CRLL class about Joan of Arc

​TOPIC: A Content-Rich Language Learning class about Joan of Arc

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INTEGRATED OBJECTIVES

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In this activity we are going to implement the CRLL approach to teach the history of Joan of Arc. CRLL stands for Content-Rich Language Learning. This means planning EFL teaching units. It shouldn’t be confused with CLIL, which is teaching content in a foreign language. As Escobar states, “The main difference between CLIL and CRLL is that CLIL is used to refer to lessons taught by content teachers in slots labelled other than language, whereas CRLL is taught by English teachers in slots labelled ‘English’”.

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Any topic can work in the English classroom, if presented appropriately. We chose the topic of Joan of Arc because it is of the interest of our students. The class is prepared taking into account all the different levels of English of the students. We also have planned how to deal with the possible problems that may emerge during the lesson. As Escobar says, “a well-designed task can turn unenthusiastic students into eager learners wanting to know more about whatever”.

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By the end of the project, students will be able to list the different events that took place during Joan of Arc’s time and narrate them. They will also learn to use appropriate interactive strategies to negotiate the meaning of the video. Students will be able to explain and develop the questions on the Edpuzzle.

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CONTENTS

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  - Knowledge skills

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      History: Joan of Arc

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• French military heroin and Catholic saint.

• Born in 1412 in a village called Domrémy, in France. She was the daughter of a farmer who also had a position as the village official who collected taxes.

• When she was 12 years old, she had a vision: Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret told her to defeat the English and help Charles VII become king of France.

• At the age of 16, she was denied to visit the French Royal Court, but she gained support from two soldiers and managed to get a meeting. She made a prediction about a military reversal that became true and the king took her seriously.

• The Royal Court gave her permission to travel with the army and wear armour to the expedition to Orléans. They might have thought she was the last hope for France.      

• Her first military victory in the siege of Orléans made her obtain royal permission to accompany the army in further offensive actions which lead to victories during the Hundred-year wars.  

• In 1430 she was captured in Margny, in the north of Compiègne, and sold to the English government.

• She was sentenced to death and burned to the stake at the age of 19.

• Many years ago, she was proven innocent and she was canonized in 1920.
   

  - Language skills

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Listening, interaction, speaking, narrative skills (past tenses / connectors)

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The main skills that are going to be necessary in this activity are listening, interaction and speaking.

Listening is going to be an important part of the activity as the students will have to listen in order to understand the activity. They will have to listen to the teacher and also to be able to answer to the Edpuzzle.

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Speaking is strictly related to the interaction skill, in this case, as they will need to speak in order to interact with each other and also to complete the activity which consists on being able to explain the legend of Joan of Arc. Here, the narrative skills will also be important in order to be able to explain the story and the sequence of events properly.

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CLASS CONTEXT

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The class will be composed of adult students with an approximate level around A2 and B1 from the CEFR. Some students have difficulties with the listening skills, and consequently, they will especially need help during the EdPuzzle.

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The session will take place in a private house. Our resources will be limited but we will have a projector as digital support. Students will not need any worksheets or notebooks since our activity is mainly listening, speaking and interacting.

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ACTIVITY

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This activity will have three stages: the opening (2 min), the main task (6 min) and the closing (1 min). The first two stages will be done in pairs and the last one individually. In order to active students’ schemata, the teacher is going to project a google presentation and will try to elicit questions from them. students will most likely know something about Joan of Arc since they are adults. But the objective is for them to remember the knowledge they know and learn new facts about our heroine. This stage will help students with the understanding of the video since they will already know the content of what they are going to watch. In this first stage, the students will practice the interacting and the speaking skills. The material for this part can be found in the following link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FWmXkUtgjIs59H5A8aWz5sDS3cyeu0LtuQOM8IhHLu4/edit#slide=id.g1b22da6a7c_1_22

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After the introduction, students will be shown an Edpuzzle about Joan of Arc. The video is not easy and students will receive help from the teacher whenever is needed. In this main task, they will use the interacting, the speaking and the listening skills.

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To conclude the task, students are shown the last slide and due to lack of time we do not start a debate and just let them reflect on the statements written on the slides. Lastly, we thank them for their collaboration. In this final stage, students will practice the reading skill.

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SCAFFOLDING

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Due to the short time devoted to the activity there will not be much scaffolding. However, our introduction to the main activity (EdPuzzle) will serve as an activation of the schemata. One of the strategies to help students understand is to emphasize key vocabulary. Vocabulary will not be especially difficult; however, we will pre-teach through the google slides medieval military related vocabulary, such as sword, shield or army. Regarding grammar, we will be using past tenses and modals of speculations, which will be as well introduced during the introduction. We will not teach them. Instead, we are going to use them and through the demonstration of use, students will follow. Another strategy is to speak clearly when explaining the activity using a variety of techniques to make the content concepts clear, such as gestures, paraphrasing, visuals…

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One strategy to make students produce is to give them hands on materials. They watch a very short video; otherwise, they would get distracted. Divide the content into meaningful short pieces and each one of them has to talk about a different part. Another strategy is giving students immediate feedback on how good they did; this also helps them to produce more and better.

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ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

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One of the anticipated problems we will have to deal with is the fact that students may find the video too difficult and the pace too fast. Since we will be dealing with a mixed-level class, we will try to elicit some help from the more advanced students in difficult stages such as the understanding of the video. In order not to abandon the less advanced students, we will encourage them to participate during the interaction and speaking parts. Therefore, we will try to find a balance in the students’ interventions.

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Regarding vocabulary and grammar, as mentioned in the scaffolding part, we will introduce them through the google slides presentation. Moreover, pronunciation might be an issue with new vocabulary; consequently, we will use tools such as echo questions and repetition in order to draw the attention to  their mistakes.

 

MATERIAL

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We call this lesson SCAFFOLDING. One would think, “how strange?” “I thought this was a CRLL lesson about Joan of Arc, and the target language to be taught was narrative speech.”  Well, you would be correct! That was the objective of this lesson, but we are human beings who live on planet Earth, so we must be realistic. Can you teach narrative speech, and all of the vocabulary needed for four students, who you don’t know and honestly expect them to retell the entire story of Joan of Arc in a one hour lesson? The answer, ladies and gentleman, is that NO, you CANNOT. As future teachers we have to be realistic!

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Our objective in designing the material for this lesson, was to take an approach that I like to call APPR (Activation, Practice, Production, Reflection). In an educational context, where you are have continuity with your students i.e. you are going to be teaching them for more than just one lesson, this makes learning more meaningful in the CRLL classroom. However, we used APPR on drugs, and by on drugs I mean speed. Thus, the activation phase was taught together with the practice/production phases. We used images as a text stimulus, along with simple questions which we knew at least one of our students would be able to answer in order  to activate prior knowledge, and get the practice/production ball rolling. This essentially means that the image/text stimulus was used as scaffolding with the aim of helping our students tell the story of Joan of Arc i.e. involving them and asking them to be active participants in the lesson.

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The next step in our APPR sequence, after having provided several image/written text stimuli, was to give them more input and build up their confidence (i.e. ambiguity tolerance in listening comprehension). The students were shown a one minute video clip on Joan of Arc’s bibliography. We chose the image stimuli throughout the first slides based on the images in the one minute Youtube video. This way even though our students might only understand very little of what was said in the video, at least the images could easily be recognized, because they had previously seen them and talked about them in the first practice/production phase. After watching the video once, our students watched it again, this time through Edpuzzle. With Edpuzzle, the video stops automatically at the questions we created, that way we have more practice and production, all the while checking for listening comprehension, and providing more input through this form of planned scaffolding.

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Lastly to close our mini CRLL  session, we built a timeline with google slides, printed it out and laminated it. On the last two slides of this timeline presentation there were mini-images that our students had already seen in the presentation, which had also been printed and laminated. The timeline contained simple questions to elicit narrative speech (our target structure). Our aim for this task is for our students to use the images to build the timeline and retell Joan of Arc’s story cooperatively as a group, doing it this way provides spontaneous scaffolding because our students had the support of each other, the images, and the short questions on the timeline, to help them feel confident enough to speak in English about such a rich, meaningful, true (his) story, or in the case of Joan (her) story!

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https://edpuzzle.com/media/58b2ccd39014ac7ad0c169b4 --> Edpuzzle to help them survive the listening ;)

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/7-surprising-facts-about-joan-of-arc --> Interesting facts

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FWmXkUtgjIs59H5A8aWz5sDS3cyeu0LtuQOM8IhHLu4/edit?usp=sharing --> Google slides about Joan of Arc

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oxR6ER3dXbWdsyVF93zLgiYJLN15s9Qu84yg1w5Xl5c/edit?usp=sharing --> Time line that will be printed for the students to build and explain to tell the story of Joan of Arc

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REFLECTIONS

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Amanda Moeller

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First of all, I have to say that creating this CRLL lesson on Joan of Arc has been so much fun! I love art and history; CRLL is the perfect excuse to marry the two and send them off in their honeymoon vehicle. The vehicle I am referring to here, is the language, English.

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I call English the honeymoon vehicle because after this class, at least for me while teaching it, I fell in love with teaching English all over again. It felt refreshed, renewed, and eager to carry on with this new CRLL teaching method, as a recently married couple feels when they return from their honeymoon. As any young couple about to take the plunge and say “I do;” I nearly got cold feet. Lack of experience, and not actually knowing the students that I was going to teach beforehand was a little unsettling.  I had no idea of their level of English, their tastes, nor their tolerance for ambiguity in language learning etc. Thus as anyone who has ever promised to spend the rest of their life with another person, I had to take a leap of faith.

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I felt extremely fortunate that the guests of our little the ceremony, the marriage of art and history, were very receptive and enthusiastic. As student-teachers and former teenagers, we are all aware of the fact that in public school teaching, you don’t have benefit of choosing the guests at your CRLL wedding nor limiting the number of guests who receive invitations. Nevertheless, in this fabulous learning environment of just five eager, hard-working language learners, I felt like I was able to preside over a successful ceremony, where a the foundation for a strong, long-lasting relationship was laid.

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As the one presiding over this marriage, I had to ask myself, what resources do I have? What resources will they have? I could not answer the first question, however I could answer the latter. So I said to myself, I have a laptop which allows me to create beautiful material via internet, I have a little toy whiteboard, that my four year old son loves to draw on, and I have the tools given by my classical theatre training to try to communicate this message I want my students to receive, and I have a video camera. So here we go, LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION…and BREATHE…”Amanda, don’t forget you have to let your students do the talking. You are not the PROTAGONIST in this film!

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As I have mentioned above, I walked away from this lesson with sense of fulfillment and gratitude. Gratitude for my partners, Claudia, Irene, Alice, and Kaouthar for giving me this opportunity to teach, gratitude for the lovely participants who so graciously gave us a few hours of their time on a Sunday for our little CRLL experiment, and a deep appreciation for all that we have learned about in this module about CLIL. So with that I will leave it to my partners in this adventure to review the film. In the post honeymoon phase, I’ve still got rose colored glasses on, so I need their feedback, to write a proper, objective “film review”

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Alice Depalle

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In the lesson that we have designed we had the chance to create a content-rich class, so we had the freedom to choose any topic. We were not afraid of the vast range of options that we had in front of us, and as we all love history, we quickly came up with the idea to plan activities revolving around it. The story of Joan of Arc, a strong French woman who helped her country, was the chosen one.

Being able to integrate this content to an English class is as interesting for teachers as for students. We have to remember that languages are merely instrumental, and students (and us, teachers) are tired of the same content year after year, so we have to fill the lessons with interesting and meaningful content.

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Having the topic in mind, we had to think about the goals of the task, the knowledge and the language skills that students had to have and achieve, and then design the most suitable activities. Some scaffolding had to be given in order for them to understand the video and answer the questions of the Edpuzzle, and being able to read the timeline and express their thoughts and opinions.

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I was not able to go to Lleida, so I could not encourage Amanda and help my team with the filming; although maybe it was a good thing to low the stress of the volunteer students (maybe they would have felt so nervous if they had five student-teachers watching them!). However, I did not miss anything as I was in charge of the video editing and I could see the entire performance of Amanda and the students.

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Kaouthar Boushah

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When we were thinking about how to create a CRLL session, we agreed on taking into account the interest of our students. They are all adults and all of them like history. That is why we decided to teach the legend of Joan of Arc. We imagined that they would know something about that character. So, that would make the session much more interesting and engaging for them.

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The students seemed engaged while doing the task. This can be seen in the video where all of them are taking part in the class. I think Amanda did a great job on playing the teacher role because she was trying to make students participate as much as possible. For example, she elicits the vocabulary by saying the first letters of a word. She makes it easy for them so they don’t feel pressure or overwhelmed for not knowing enough, especially in front of the camera.

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I think that's what a CRLL session is about; to learn the content (Joan of Arc's story) and the language (English) at the same time.

 

Clàudia Jiménez

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Participating in this amazing project gave me the chance to interact with my fellow teacher colleagues to create a collaborative project. Teachers usually work on their own and prepare their materials individually. However, today’s teaching system is changing and it demands a higher collaborations between work colleagues. In the future, we may need to work in Project-based schools, we may  be required to use a CRLL approach or help other teachers with CLIL within our high school. Therefore, this collaborative project has given me the chance to work as a team.

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Regarding the project, Amanda proposed the topic of Joan of Arc and I thought it was a perfect topic for our future students, adults who already know something about Joan of Arc and using the English language as a tool communicate, they were able to learn even more. It was especially interesting to observe how much students were involved in the lesson and how this interest helped them forget they were speaking in English, a language they do not feel comfortable with. Amanda’s role as a guiding teacher did not overwhelm them and allowed them to express their opinions whenever they considered necessary. Being able to observe a class from the outside also gave me a new perspective towards my future lessons, which I hope they will be as entertaining as this one was.

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I must admit I was reluctant at first to the idea of the EdPuzzle as I thought the video was too difficult for our students. However, Amanda’s scaffolding helped them throughout the activity. At the end, students were able to complete the timeline on their own and give some insights about Joan of Arc’s role in the 100-year war and her influence in our society.

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Irene Reig

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It is true that having absolute freedom to choose a topic it is at first a little overwhelming. That made me think that maybe this is one of the reasons why most teachers do not use the CRLL approach, because maybe they do not know how to apply it. However, I have also realised how challenging and interesting it can be and how it can be engaging for both students and teachers. For students as they are learning two things at the same time; English and knowledge about a topic which they can also find useful for they daily life. And for teacher as they also are able to learn and teach about other interesting topics.

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I believe that CRLL also gives the opportunity to students to learn from each other and also from teachers to learn from students which is something that I really like. It gives you the chance to make the classes more engaging and communicative.

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In this particular case, it was amazing to see how students with low level were able to follow a class completely in English, you could see that they did not understand everything, but with their previous knowledge and the materials they were able to interact with each other, learn new words and learn extra facts about Joan of Arc’s live.

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